Boubous and adieus.

Alright, as promised, here are the pictures of our boubous! We all wore them for church on Sunday and then we rounded everyone up for pictures. What do you think?

I am obsessed with mine a little bit.

Sunday night, we went over to the village for a last little soirée and to say goodbye to them. Such cute kids.

They got all dressed up to do some lutte-ing

This is how we wrestle... à la sénégalais!

A cute little boy and his brother... just ignore that kid in the background!

Cool hair. I'm thinking about getting it done.

This is my little friend that would come hold my hand every day that we came.

Chelsey, practicing.

So, yeah. That was Sunday night. Since then, we have just been studying our little brains out. Yesterday we woke up early to study, had a review session for a test, and then we studied some more before the test that took me three hours. After the test, we kept on studying the material for today's test. We went to bed at like 12:30 after studying all night, I woke up at 6 to study some more, and then we started the test at 9:30. At 1:45, I finished. And yes, I was the last one. In fact, it was funny because Chelsey and I were the last ones done, so we think that's a sign that we were meant to be roommates. But afterwards my brain was pretty much fried. I felt like on Harry Potter when Dumbledore drains all his thoughts out of his head... all of my thoughts are now on several pieces of paper in Madame Thompson's room. There's nothing left. We are dreading the final!!

So then Chelsey and I went for a little walk around town to try and get our souls back. We were going to walk to the very north end of the island, but we got distracted. We found an even cooler jeweler (bad timing, since I went and got rings for everyone at the other place on the way over). Oh well. I got another ring. You might be jealous, Lisa. Sorry! I probably should just get a ton and have you all pay me back... but alas. Too little time...

We are leaving tomorrow morning at FIVE AM. What the heck. And we are hoping that the bus ride will only take us the twelve out of the seven hours that it's supposed to be (yes, you read that right. Welcome to Africa). We are headed over to the east side of Senegal, to spend a day in some national park (mini safari? yes.), and then on to Kedougou, which is supposedly super hot. Whoopy. We are very excited! Pray for me that I don't go crazy on the bus ride and that the sickies don't get the rest of us sick!

Descente du fleuve en pirogue!

It's about time for a good post, huh? We have been so busy lately that we haven't had much down time... and what free time we do have we've spent working on our papers that are due on Tuesday. I, happily, have six pages out of the 7-10 it needs to be, so I think I'm doing okay. We had a fun weekend though, here are some of the highlights:

We had our last class at the Cirlac on Friday, so here's everyone in front of it with Aminata Sow Fall, the author of two of the books we've read and one of the co-directors of the program:

The Faidherbe Bridge that connects Saint Louis to the mainland:

On Friday we loitered around the Mosque to see the prayer again (not quite as big as the turnout in Dakar, but still pretty cool). There was this dad with his two sons in matching blue boubous that we thought was adorable.

SATURDAY. We had fun. We first went to this animal reserve place to look at these deer things (I don't know what they're called) and turtles. Miles was obviously pretty excited about being there.

Me and Grace holding some little baby turtles!

Look how scary its face it...

This was a really big mistake-- I really hurt my back trying to lift the giant thing. The guy told me afterwards that it weighs 40 kilos... how many pounds is that?

Voila the animal that they are trying to preserve

A pink lake! I know there's an explanation as to why it's pink, but I don't know it

So the langue de Barbarie is like this little strip of land in between the ocean and the river. We floated down the river, not the ocean.

My favorite french verb: se ballader :)

Prof. Lee

Me and Chelsey

Purple crabs! Different from the yellow ones that we saw the other day

Waiting patiently to get on the canoe

I somehow always end up with life jackets that are way too big for me...

This was what we saw at the end of our little canoe trip: bird island. There are like hundreds of pelicans and other birds on this little tiny island. Pretty... noisy!

We parked the canoe (no, I obviously don't know the proper boat terminology here), crossed over the langue de barbarie to the other side where we found the ocean! We were too tired and hungry to really play much, but it was pretty and fun and we found tons of cool sea shells that I was working on making necklaces out of this morning with dental floss.

On the way back with our tour guide guy who was telling me about the times he's been bitten or stung by various creatures.

All in all, Saturday was fun. By the time we got home it was like 5:30, and we hadn't eaten all day. Bleh. But somehow we were all beyond hunger, so it wasn't too bad. We went and picked up the dresses that we ordered, and we're all going to wear them to church today, which starts in fifteen minutes so I'd better go get ready! I'll try to put a picture of us in our dresses up later!

Rings.

Last night we had this cute little soirée at the school in the village. They started off with a soccer game (their team won, of course), and then they had each class of students do little dances or songs. I've got tons of pictures, but not much time, so I chose this one of the most beautiful little girl in Senegal, I'm convinced. So cute!

Next: here is my new ring. I'm obsessed with it. Please disregard the discoloration at the top of my finger, it's from writing too much.

We went back to the jewelry maker today, and had to find a way to awkwardly tell him that we couldn't drink the tea that he started making for us. Haha! Really nice guy though.

Okay, here are the selection of rings. They are very cute, so let me know (soon!) if you want me to get one for you...

Les coupures-- c'est le Senegal!

So we've been having a lot of fun with the daily power outages going on here, hence why I have not updated the blog in a while! We've been twice to the cybercafe to use the internet to no avail, so we finally had to ask this girl who brought her laptop if we could use it! Enfin!Let's see, I don't have much time, so I will just try to sum up the highlights from this week:

I bought a silver ring from this guy, and I am obsessed with it! I'll put a picture up the next time. If anyone wants one, let me know, they are like eight bucks.

We've been eating the most amazing dinners in the world at the restaurant below the hotel. So, so good.

I bought some new pants (obsessed!) and we had a soiree with this awesome griot-- like a storyteller guy. So cool.

This street sign that Miles and I think looks exacly like the aliens from Signs... n'est-ce pas?

A VERY boring conference thing at the University that we left early to go sit outside because it was so boring and I literally did not understand a word of. But the campus is nice!

We went to the BEACH (I believe it was the first time I've ever been in the Atlantic Ocean...very salty) and made some new friends:

Wedding crashing:

So, yeah. We're having fun! Working on homework today, fun fun.

Saint-Louis!

So! It's been a long time! We've been in Saint-Louis for about a week now, and are getting a hang of all the good restaurants around town, and where the best stuff is! It's been fun. It's kind of a funny little town, not a lot of lights, and divided into the part south of the bridge, and the part north of the bridge. The hotel is south; la ville is north. But it's okay, it's not that big anyways! We've been spending a lot of time in class with lots of guest professors coming, learning a ton about the culture, reading our books, going to the village, and exploring la ville. Voila what I've been up to:

We all went today to get dresses and boubous (man-dresses?) made for us. I'll post pictures when they're done! Spencer (bottom left) is holding up the fabric I chose for mine

Chloe and I in the museum here in Saint-Louis. We are getting used to all the guided tours, I think. This was before I knew it wasn't allowed to take pictures...On the wall in the museum:

Everyone in front of the museum:

A bounce house in the middle of this park? Yep.

This lady in the village with her henna-ish tattoos. They were trying to get us to get them also, so I might come home looking like this:

Emily with her Uke, Grace, Madame Thompson, Kylee and I went over to the village when everyone else went back to the hotel and got to see this women's meeting in the village, which was cool. And then we sang for them, I am a child of God, as always :)

They had received all this rice from the minister of women and were figuring out how to divy it up.

Saint-Louis. I am obsessed with the architecture and the colors here; it's amazing. One thing that's sad though is that all the buildings are pretty much falling apart. The city was founded in 1659, but no one really knows who owns what building now, so no one is willing to pay to renovate them, so the whole town is really just falling apart, sad.

Chelsey and I in front of our hotel, which is right on the river (aka... lots of moustiques!)

We took a little tour of the city, and crossed over the river to "le village des pecheurs" (the fisherman's village) to take a look around. It reminded me a little bit of Kibera. 25,000 people in a 1K by 300 meters of land. We got off the bus and were surrounded by children. I made the mistake of trying to give them some pens-- I quickly realized my error when they started attacking me to get to the pens, literally. Luckily our tour guide and this other guy pulled the kids off of me before any damage was done. Let's just say, I'm a little bit afraid of children. But here are some pictures. My roommate thought it was so funny how fascinated I was by the power lines, but I've never seen anything like it!

Drying the fish

Fish heads. Yum.

Madame Thompson's friend from the village. We went to this little village, where they had the children do all these cute traditional dances and even had us dance with them. So cute!

BUT, it was Prof. Lee who won the prize for the best dancer, hands down... except for making one of the little girls cry. Haha. It was hysterical.

Stay tuned! We're going to the beach tomorrow!